Above The Business

In this solo episode, Bradley Hamner walks through the document he shared with members at the Beat the Odds retreat on the mindset, skillset, and toolset of a $3 million small business owner. It looks at who the business owner is at that level, so listeners can start becoming that person today. The mindset section covers emotional stability, mental toughness, conviction over confidence, trusting m...

In this solo episode, Bradley Hamner explains why so many small business owners struggle to delegate. They hand off an outcome and expect the other person to fill in everything they never wrote down. He shares a recent example from his own team. While they prepared a retreat for the business owners they serve, his questions about budget and other details kept getting the same answer: “I didn’t kno...

In this solo episode, Bradley Hamner breaks a business into four functional areas: offers, growth, fulfillment, and operations. He uses them to simplify the business and get a handle on it. That applies whether you are planning for the year, the quarter, or the month, or working through a period where growth feels stuck. Bradley defines each area and what to look at inside it. Offers are everythin...

In this solo episode, Bradley Hamner shares the framework he walked members through at the ninth Beat the Odds retreat: strategy, conviction, and action. The goal is to use the last two months of 2026 to prepare the business for a strong 2027. Bradley breaks strategy into three parts. The first is a clear Point A covering revenue, profitability, personal income, full-time equivalents, marketing sp...

In this solo episode, Bradley Hamner addresses the gap between taking massive action and knowing which actions actually matter. Drawing on Keith Cunningham’s The Road Less Stupid, he explains why volume without weekly thinking time turns into reactive motion. He also explains why 100 sales calls done the right way can outperform 1,000 done on repeat. Bradley walks through how he runs thinking time...

In this episode, Bradley sits down with David Meerman Scott, author of 14 books and longtime speaker, to talk about his newest book, The Fandom Playbook. David explains how years of studying the Grateful Dead, the Apollo lunar program, and the neuroscience of fandom led to a practical guide built around nine plays for generating fans of a business. They discuss why nobody cares about your products...

In this second installment of Lead Yourself First, Dustin Booth moves from concept to framework. He introduces the perfect repeatable week, a weekly template that brings consistency to the calendar and matches the most important work to the hours when energy is highest. Dustin walks through how to build it: draft all seven days in pencil, place the rocks first, then the pebbles, then the sand. He...

In this solo episode, Bradley Hamner reviews a sales team compensation plan that one of his Boardroom members, an insurance agency owner, asked him to critique. The plan fits on one page, but it is crowded with words and numbers and never tells a sales rep what quota is or what hitting it pays. Bradley walks through a stronger version built from a BlueprintOS template, with a clear base salary, co...

In this solo episode, Bradley Hamner argues that a business vision becomes a real plan only once the numbers behind it are worked out. He explains how to define point A and set a three-year point B. He then shows how to measure the gap between them across revenue, profit, customer count, and average customer value. Bradley shares the growth rates required to double a business in two or three years...

In this solo episode, Bradley Hamner walks through the scorecard he built to evaluate his own business acquisition deals. The trigger is a recent sit-down with the owner of a deck company who has been the rainmaker of his business for 30 years. Bradley uses that conversation to test whether there is a transferable asset to buy or only the owner’s job. He covers the work in three parts. Before the...

In this solo episode, Bradley Hamner closes the operating system best practices series with one principle: owners do not get bonus points for remembering. After hearing "I don't remember that number" from business owners on recent calls, he argues the more important question is whether you know where to look. He walks through a vendor sales call for the exterior remodeling company, where questions...

In this solo episode, Bradley Hamner continues the operating system series with a step that comes before writing any new documentation. Any business that has operated for a while already holds valuable assets: intake forms, discovery call notes, sales process documents, spreadsheets, and organized folders. Bradley explains why he never recognized these as assets until he started building his own o...

In this solo episode, Bradley Hamner opens Q4 by focusing on the step that decides whether quarterly priorities actually get done: allocating resources to them. He outlines the BlueprintOS planning structure of three-year vision, one-year objectives, and quarterly priorities, and walks through a simple process for narrowing a long list down to three to five priorities. Bradley then breaks down wha...

In this solo episode, Bradley Hamner continues the operating system series with a detail most owners skip: making every document in the business look the same. He explains why a shared standard for fonts, headings, colors, and margins signals to the team that the company runs by design. Without one, documents end up looking thrown together, like Frankenstein. Bradley walks through the Playbook for...

In this episode, Dustin Booth opens Lead Yourself First, a new Above The Business series built around a core concept inside the BlueprintOS community. He explains why business owners need to manage themselves with intention before they can lead their team, their business, and their family well. Dustin frames the owner as the metronome of the business, the person who sets the rhythm and pace everyo...

In this solo episode, Bradley Hamner continues the operating system series by laying out the folder structure that holds a business's documentation. The previous episode dealt with organizing what already exists. This one gives those assets a permanent home, whether the company runs on Google Drive, a Microsoft shared drive, or Dropbox. Bradley walks through the four business principles of clarity...

In this solo episode, Bradley Hamner continues the operating system series by applying the KonMari method to the files scattered across a growing business. He works through the six principles from Marie Kondo's book on tidying up and maps each one onto the work of documenting how a company actually runs. Bradley covers the commitment required to systemize once and for all, why the vision for the b...

In this solo episode, Bradley Hamner opens a short series on the foundational principles behind a business operating system. He goes back to a 2016 Strategic Coach session in Toronto, where an owner doing $40 million in revenue told him the difference came down to documented systems, processes, and a team, then pulled up his computer at lunch and showed him what those documents actually looked lik...

In this solo episode, Bradley Hamner works through a coaching conversation with a business owner who says twice in the same meeting that he and his second in command need to get on the same page. Bradley asks whether either of them has ever put anything into a shared document. The answer is no. Bradley walks through what happens next. The two of them list roughly twenty open items on a live screen...

In this solo episode, Bradley Hamner describes a Friday sales call review he used to attend, where the person running it removed a participant within the first five minutes for showing up without timestamps. He recounts what happened to the woman who came prepared, took blunt feedback on her discovery and her pitch, and returned the following week having closed four of her five calls. Bradley expl...

In this solo episode, Bradley Hamner breaks down the eight best practices behind a monthly team bonus that the team tracks on its own. He built the one-pager after a listener emailed asking how to structure one, and he walks through the whole thing here. Bradley covers aligning the bonus to quarterly priorities or annual objectives, keeping the math simple enough to explain in a sentence, and putt...

In this solo episode, Bradley Hamner makes the case for the Socratic method as a team development tool. He opens with an analogy. A person drowning in the water needs a rope, not a question about how they ended up there. There are moments when a team member needs the answer handed to them, and moments when the better move is to draw the answer out of them. Bradley walks through what skilled questi...

In this solo episode, Bradley Hamner breaks down the three functional areas of a business: growth, delivery and fulfillment, and operations. Owners lean hard into one of them based on what they did before they started the company, and that tilt shows up in the books they read, the conferences they attend, and the problems they instinctively reach for. Bradley explains how growth splits further int...

In this solo episode, Bradley Hamner maps where developing your team actually sits inside a business blueprint. Team is one of the principles in the BlueprintOS operating system, and it carries three playbooks: attract A-players, develop A-players, and retain A-players. This episode covers the middle one and picks up directly from last week's conversation on performance improvement plans. Bradley...

In this solo episode, Bradley Hamner makes the case that the business owner is the wrong person to document the company's systems and processes. Bradley revisits the three components of a blueprint: personal leadership, a roadmap for growth, and an operating system built on documented playbooks. He explains why appointing a systems champion, someone already on the team who owns documentation as an...